Ether 14:4 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
the brother of [ Jared > Shared 1|Shared ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] did give battle unto him in the wilderness of Akish

Here Oliver Cowdery accidentally wrote “the brother of Jared” initially in 𝓟. Virtually immediately he caught his error, crossed out the entire Jared, and supralinearly wrote Shared (there is no difference in the level of ink flow for the supralinear Shared ). Oliver was obviously used to writing “the brother of Jared”, which occurs 44 times earlier in the book of Ether, including six times nearby in Ether 12. Here in Ether 14:4 we have the second instance of “the brother of Shared”. The first occurs in the previous verse; there Oliver wrote down the name correctly, but here in verse 4 the higher frequency of “the brother of Jared” led him to make this momentary error. In all, there are four instances of “the brother of Shared”, all here in Ether 14. Of course, Shared is correct here in verse 4.

Summary: Maintain the four instances of “the brother of Shared” in Ether 14, including the one in verse 4 that Oliver Cowdery initially wrote as “the brother of Jared”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 6

References